Winter Shrubs Flowering in January
I am going to be writing about our garden at Knapp Farm through 2022, so a short physical description is in order. Wootton Fitzpaine lies about a mile inland from Charmouth, surrounded by hills rising to about 200 metres behind us. The old house, nearly 500 years old, sits well back from the road, facing due south. Looking out from the front porch, there is a long herbaceous border on your right running down to a blue shed, looking like an old fashioned seaside beach hut or a sentry box. This is a stall run by our neighbour Mary Durling who sells fresh produce, eggs, apple juice a home made herbal remedies. Janie sells her pots to raise money for refugees. We started in May 2020 and it has been a great success, despite being burgled on the first day.
Closer at had there is an ancient cherry tree, probably planted 50 years ago when Olive Pass, recently widowed, moved out of the manor into Knapp Farm, with her eldest daughter, Catherine Fortescue and her family. Not a lot remains of their garden, but since they liked to go sailing, they made sure they had winter flowers. A long hedge of bright yellow jasmine nudiflorum runs along the track that runs to the back of Knapp and to our neighbours’ front yard.
This begins to flower in mid November and peaks around Christmas. It is good to cut in tight bud and bring into the house looking like a bunch of knitting needles. They soon come out into flower and happily last a week in water. Like sweet peas, they look best on their own, unmixed with other flowers or foliage. Once they have finished flowering, the hedge is trimmed back tightly and looks a bit forlorn for a few weeks, but by the end of April, new shoots have appeared and provide a fresh Green hedge all summer, all ready to do its thing once more come the winter, utterly reliable and trouble free.
Other legacies of the Fortescues are: the winter-flowering Cherry, Prunus subhirtella autumnale, which has been blooming strongly since mid-November; various Mahonias; and the sweet-smelling winter honeysuckle, Lonicera Fragrantissima. All are well worth planting if you have the room. We have added several other good winter shrubs, all of which are flowering well on New Year’s Day. The one I wouldn’t be without is Witch Hazel, Hamamelis x intermedia ‘pallida’. I think it would grow best in a woodland garden, and have surrounded it with birch trees, but they are not yet large enough to give it much cover. It’s not a fast grower but I look forward it to being large enough for me to bring scented branches into the house. Our second introduction was a white flowering Japanese Quince, Chaenomeles x Superba ‘Jet Trail’, which is again a great winter cut flower, brought into the house in tight bud. Once the buds open, they last for days without dropping petals.
Another introduction, which seems completely hardy in climate-changed West Dorset is Acacia Baileyana, which is perhaps the perfect tree for small gardens, Its evergreen foliage is silvery blue, shading to deep maroon at its tips. It has mimosa-like flowers in January, but in our experience, they don’t survive when cut and brought indoors, but no plant in the garden is more admired. It is quite easily raised from seed. We are also enjoying two climbers, Solanum Laxum, known until recently (more expressively) as Solanum Jasminoides, and a winter flowering clematis, Winter Beauty, which is well on its way up the south-facing front of the house.
Our final winter bloomer, which came as a gift six or seven years ago is Correa, an Australian native. We are not sure which species we have, but it may be reflexa, which grows wild in Australia. When it arrived, we assumed it would be too tender to survive, and left it out in its pot, not bothering to find a spot for it. It thrived on neglect and now lives happily on an east-facing wall, flowering steadily from October onwards. One bonus of winter-flowering shrubs is the length of their flowering season. This may arise from two factors. On the one hand, the cool weather means that the flowers are not shrivelled by hot son. The other maybe that they need the extra time to attract pollinating insects.
On the ground, Hellebores are coming into flower, the darker ones first. We also picked the first Purple Sprouting Broccoli of the year from the cage, which is designed to exclude cabbage white butterflies. We have also enjoyed more blooms than ever before from our Algerian Iris (I. Unguicularis) which actually grows as a wild flower all round the Mediterranean. It is not much grown as a garden plant, as it needs a sunny spot, preferably under a south-facing wall, and looks like rather scruffy grass for most of the year. We treat it as a perfect cut flower, opening from tight bud in a couple of hours.
It has been great start to the year with the first four snowdrops appearing among the old apple trees that border the eastern edge of our garden. I think the mild damp December, without a single frost set us up for a perfect send-off to 2022, and as a final bonus, we had our first purple sprouting broccoli (PSB), which has never appeared so early in the year, but I did buy the seedlings last summer as “Early PSB”. I will try again with our own seed this coming summer.